Area residents recall JFK's assassination

“We were in a pep rally against Norristown…one of our big sports rivals. Then, out of nowhere, we were all sent to the cafeteria, where they told us the news. We were dismissed early.”

Whitemarsh native Carol Wolfinger doesn’t miss a beat when asked where she was when she heard President John F. Kennedy had been shot. The former Carol Lankford was a Plymouth Whitemarsh High School sophomore, and she – like nearly everyone questioned – can visualize her surroundings “almost like it was yesterday.”

“It was shocking,” says Wolfinger, who works in the business office at Lafayette Hill’s Masonic Village.

That adjective came up repeatedly as area residents thought back to Nov. 22, 1963 and their reaction to the JFK assassination.

At 84, King of Prussia resident M. Ruth Shand recollects President Kennedy’s death as “a terrible shock.”

“People just seemed to gather together…gravitate towards their friends and neighbors,” Shand says. “People just felt the need to be with one another…as they did after 9-11.”

Phoenixville’s Linda Koller, a stylist at the Jean Madeline salon in Plymouth Meeting, was only 4 in 1963, but she recalls “a few little things…seeing the funeral on TV, noticing the flag on the casket, asking my mother why that flag was there.”

“That’s about it, although when I think back, I can still see that big old box TV we had,” Koller says. “And the flag…that really got my attention for some reason.”

Plymouth Meeting artist Susannah Hart Thomer, 15 at the time, can still picture President Kennedy “slumped over in the car.”

“I was stunned to think that anybody could do that in a crowd of hundreds of people celebrating him,” Thomer adds.

Another common thread, the ability to recall precisely where they were and what they were doing when they learned about the 35th U.S. president’s murder.

“I was in Mrs. Lorenz’s ninth grade algebra class at Conshy High,” Plymouth Meeting’s Jim Volz says. “Some kid ran in and said, ‘The president’s been shot.’ We all just sat there. It was such a shock, you didn’t know what to do.”

Blocks away, future Conshohocken Mayor Robert Frost and a friend at “the old St. Matt’s grade school on Hector Street” had been enlisted to walk an injured classmate home.

“He had jumped off something in the schoolyard and hurt his leg,” Frost says. “His leg was swollen, and as we walked past one of the garages in Angel Alley, one of the guys who worked there told us, ‘The president’s been shot.’ We didn’t know what to think, so we just went back to school. I was about 13.”

Conshohocken businessman and historian Jack Coll was a third-grader at St. Helena’s elementary school in Philadelphia.

“I still remember the announcement coming over the P.A. system,” says Coll, who owns Coll’s Custom Framing and has published several books about local history. “I remember it was about 1:30 or so, and I remember the nuns in the hallway crying. We were told to put our heads down and pray from 1:30 to about 3:30.

“But the main thing I remember is watching television the entire weekend and being ... off because all the cartoons and all my shows were off and I was stuck watching this stuff play out that I didn’t understand. I do recall vividly — like it was yesterday — seeing Jack Ruby shoot (Lee Harvey) Oswald. But I was just a little kid, and I’m sorry to say none of it clicked in with any meaning. It was obviously a monumental event, but the only thing on my mind was, I wish whatever this is would end so I can get back to The Three Stooges.

“Of course, a lot of people from this area had seen Kennedy in person when he stopped in West Conshohocken after he’d been down in the Roxborough area…on his way to Norristown. In Norristown, he stayed at the old Valley Forge Hotel on Main Street and made an appearance at Roosevelt Field…which was mobbed for the event. So a lot of people from around here still talk about seeing him when he made those stops.”

Cindy Eastman, Upper Merion Senior Service Center executive director, was roughly the same age as Coll that fall.

“I absolutely remember it,” Eastman says. “I was at Levering Elementary School in Roxborough…in the schoolyard for afternoon recess. When somebody started talking about it, my girlfriend and I ran to her house to see if it was on TV. Then we ran back to school. I remember everybody crying…kids, grownups, everyone.”

Times Herald Features Editor Philomena Roberto Johns was a freshman at Norristown’s former Bishop Kenrick High School in the fall of 1963.

“I was in my afternoon German class when unexplained static started coming out of the intercom for several minutes,” Johns says. “Then, a radio broadcast came on, and the announcer said President Kennedy had been shot and had died.

“We were a mixed class of ninth and 11th graders, and we just all looked at each other in shock. Our teacher, John Schilling, was a very spiritual man and immediately led us in a prayer. Classes were dismissed, and we made our way to our lockers, with both students and nuns crying in the hallways.

“It just didn’t seem real.”Plymouth Meeting’s Dianne Wiggins was in American history class at the Lincoln School in Providence, R.I.

“One of the boarding students came in and said that Kennedy had been shot,” says Wiggins, a technician in Abington Hospital’s chemistry lab. “Of course, no one believed her. The teacher told her to get her radio, and there it was – Kennedy had been shot. I got home, and my mother was glued to the TV. We watched (nothing else) for three days or more, and we were out of school for the rest of the week.”

Monsignor John Marine, a Catholic priest who grew up in the Norristown area, has no trouble thinking back to Nov. 22, 1963.

“I remember it very vividly,” he says. “I was in eighth grade at Holy Saviour in Norristown. Sister Jane Marie, our principal, came over the P.A. system and said, ‘Boys and girls, I have some terrible news. Our president has been wounded by gunshot in Dallas.’ She asked every classroom to stop whatever they were doing and say the Rosary. We got about halfway through, and, then, you could hear her tapping on the P.A. Everyone was dreading what she would say…and she came on with the news that he had died.

“The girls were crying. Sister Mary Helen, our eighth grade teacher was crying, and seeing that was very upsetting. We had early dismissal, and everybody left in total silence.

“I was very sad and frightened because the year before, we’d had the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the president being shot a year later, everyone felt worried and frightened that something else would happen to our country. Remember, it was a bad time for U.S.-Russian relations…the height of the Cold War.”

Marine calls the Kennedy shooting “a defining moment for all of us.”

“We had studied about Abraham Lincoln being assassinated but thought, ‘That’s history’ – not something any of us had experienced. The Kennedy assassination was a true crisis. I was glued to the TV for four days. And it was amazing to watch the wheels of government turn…Lyndon Johnson taking the oath as president, the funeral, all of it.”

Eagleville native John Shoemaker was on the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll in the western Pacific, courtesy the U.S. Navy. Shoemaker had joined the Navy three months after his 1961 graduation from Norristown High School and was doing a routine news check in the Kwajalein base’s communications center.

“I heard the AP and UPI buzzers go off, so I walked over to see what was happening, and it said JFK had been shot,” Shoemaker remembers. “I told the other people in the communications center, and it was crazy… Then, our top secret teletype went off. I’ll never forget that. Not in a million years. It was mind-boggling.”

Fifty years ago, Sandi Fryer, executive director of Conshohocken’s Colonial Neighborhood Council, was 8 or 9 – a student at the former Penn Square Elementary School.

“It’s weird what sticks in your mind,” Fryer says. “I was…in an assembly where the principal was playing the ukulele. The secretary came on the P.A., and the kids were cheering just to make Mr. Fenmore stop playing. But then she started crying and said the president was shot. I remember thinking, ‘How could this happen? He’s the president. Bad things didn’t happen to important people.’

“Then, everywhere you looked, people were crying. The teachers, bus driver… When we got home from school, my mom wouldn’t let us talk so we had to sit and watch the TV. Nobody in the neighborhood was outside. My grandmother had a picture of JFK in her living room right next to the picture of the pope.”

Plymouth Meeting native Alice Arena was a senior at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School and hasn’t forgotten PW’s stillness as students were dismissed for the day.

“It was a strange feeling that there were no sounds in the halls except occasional weeping,” says Arena, who currently lives in Norristown. “I remember sitting in my bedroom and feeling so sad. I don’t think I ever felt that deep sadness before. The days after all of this were so sad with the news and the swearing in of President Johnson and the funeral. It’s amazing how people we do not even know can touch us so deeply.”